The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping – the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.
I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.
Some snippets from the article:
Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase ‚Äúself-handicapping‚Äù to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…
Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.
Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…
As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.
I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.
She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (“you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (“you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.
Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.
It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.
Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.
Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.
Mind Hacks 
Story of my life.
Hi Vaughn,
You’re quite right to make the link to Carol Dweck’s work on trait and process praise. She has explicitly described self-handicapping as one of the forms of defensiveness that grows as a consequence of trait praise.
All the best,
Coert Visser
PS I love the Mindhacks site
I think it works like this:
Short term gains are greater when self-handicapping.
On repeated use everything is judged on the regular scale and with excuses from someone else you’d be judged on the self-handicapped scale.
I’ve been playing with the idea of intentional self-delusion (or -denial) – a healthy version. For example, I have a dentist appointment, and my “black hat” mind (after De Bono) focuses mostly on negative outcomes. There’s value in this approach (say when engineering a bridge – “What could fail?”) but for me it gets in the way of enjoying life. So instead I’m trying to assume the best – visualizing it, saying it, imagining skipping out of the exam, happy with everything being fine. It’s hard. Any ideas?